One of science fiction’s greatest powers as a genre is its ability to divorce a topic from all of the usual bullshit which surrounds it, forcing the reader/viewer to examine a topic in a new way. We live in a present dominated by people trying to pass off the unreal as real and true as “fake.” And I’m sure some of these same people have read 1984, or maybe they should. The true monsters that come to Maple Street in The Twilight Zone may have been helped along by things from outer space, but can tragically be found in a lot of people by looking in a mirror and being honest about their fear.
In some ways, everything anyone ever needed to know about common decency is probably found in an episode of Star Trek. Our distinctions and biases alone are as stupid as two aliens arguing whether one is superior because they’re black or white on the right or left side. If removed from birthright, what does it mean to be a citizen if it has to be earned through service to the state and society, like in Starship Troopers? And, on The Planet of the Apes, the damn dirty apes need to take their stinking paws off of Charlton Heston, but the story itself is more about race, class, justice and the absurdity of nuclear war that’s seared into place by an iconic image of the Statue of Liberty.
Created by Charlie Brooker, most episodes of Black Mirror are set in a not-so-distant future and vary greatly in subject matter and tone, but all the stories share a theme of the interaction between technology and humanity. The title references the reflection given by a television, smartphone or any electronic device with a screen. The result is something which is both truly shocking and very thought-provoking.
The fourth season of the series began streaming on Netflix about a week or so ago, and the six new episodes have been divisive among some of the show’s fanbase, but the subject matter has struck on many recent dissonant social chords, including the toxic fandoms behind things such as Gamergate, the abuse men can exact to those underneath them in some ways, and the loss of privacy and personal control which advances in technology allow. All in all, it leads to a vision of high-tech hell. The standout episode is arguably the first, “USS Callister,” which uses a very familiar setting to analyze the dynamics of being treated less than human.
“The difference between smartphones and cigarettes is this: a cigarette robs 10 minutes from your lifespan, but at least has the decency to wait and withdraw all that time in bulk as you near the end of your life – whereas a smartphone steals your time in the present moment, by degrees. Five minutes here. Five minutes there. Then you look up and you’re 85 years old.”
—Charlie Brooker
The best episodes of Black Mirror make the viewer uncomfortable in how possible they seem, and the nervous feeling people might actually behave the way depicted if given new technological tools. But Brooker is right in the blockquote above, in that the technology is just a means to an end. In most of the stories, the horror is predicated on human tendencies that exist in the here and now in the absence of advanced technology.
The technology itself is not really the problem. It doesn’t come to life and take over lives, or start killing people because it’s suddenly self-aware. It’s what humans do with the technology that makes things go to shit in these stories. A smartphone is a device which, in theory, should connect people and make human connections easier. But what happens when people are really more connected to their phone than the people on the other end of a call or text? Or, if one could own and control something artificial that could feel and think just like a human, should they? Would it be wrong? Or would it always be a machine running lines of code, which we could mistreat however we want?
One of the worst aspects of human behavior is we have a tendency to devalue things, even when their value is self-evident, because we can rationalize being terrible to things that are devalued with little to no moral consequence. As a society, we can rationalize the value of life and feelings downbased on competing interests. Whether those interests are for what’s deemed a greater principle, distinctions without a difference, the love of money, or the selfishness of pleasure, there are times where the value of an individual’s liberty loses in the equation. The average person makes these choices every day in how they live their lives. Whether it’s a shirt from H&M, a bra from Victoria’s Secret or a new iPhone made on the other side of the planet in some factory with not so nice conditions, there’s a certain amount of suffering that goes into it. And a large majority of the population, either through ignorance or indifference, values their luxuries more than the lives of the people who make those luxuries possible. And cultures make these choices when they let assholes get away with being assholes, leading to too many people having to say #metoo.
Black Mirror re-contextualizes these impulses in a science-fiction setting where they can be seen under a new light.
From Katherine Cross at Polygon:
Daly is the “asshole god” of this virtual world, and his word is law.
This episode, surely one of Black Mirror’s best, is a towering allegory about how fandom becomes a nightmare when used to express abusive entitlement.
Daly’s sentient clones have to live in a world that mirrors an idealistic TV show that’s under the control of a man who learned none of its lessons while copying all of its trappings. He’s an omnipotent, Kirk-style captain, who can leave his pawns permanently suffocating in-game if they refuse to join his self-aggrandizing roleplay.
Nanette Cole, a real-world coder and the episode’s protagonist, wants to escape from the nightmare. The story is told from her perspective, and the rest of the “crew” explains the situation as they welcome her to this hell. I saw many reflections of my own experience through the eyes of this character, being a female nerd and fan in a community that turns the colors of my joy into tormenting dreams.
“USS Callister” does something remarkable by following Cole instead of Daly. It could have credibly dwelled in what is worst about our fandoms, but instead, the episode ends on a redemptive note worthy of Star Trek itself.
Among the series’ episodes:
- The National Anthem: The story posits a borderline ridiculous situation—or maybe not so ridiculous situation— to portray social media mob mentality.
- 15 Million Merits: Takes Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and E. M. Forster's The Machine Stops merges them with Facebook and American Idol to make a very cynical commentary on materialism and a celebrity-obsessed society.
- The Entire History of You: This is the most disturbing episode of the show’s run, because those characters are so believable, as well as the situation, where insecurities and jealousy builds to an awful conclusion.
- Be Right Back: The very real emotions of grief, loss and loneliness are used to make a point about how the persona we project online doesn’t exactly encompass who we really are.
- White Bear: The idea at the crux of the episode gives a lot of people what they claim to want with the issue at the heart of the story, and you see how awful it would be, even if the person arguably deserved it.
- The Waldo Moment: Usually considered among the weakest of the series’ offerings, but its points about media and the tendency to turn serious issues over to rants from absurd figures for ratings seems somewhat prophetic given our current situation.
- White Christmas: This is probably one of the most unsettling explorations of high-tech forms of slavery and the potentials of being deemed a “blocked” non-person by your friends, loved ones and society.
- Nosedive: Written by Mike Schur and Rashida Jones, and somewhat similar to what happened with the MeowMeowBeanz app in Community’s App Development and Condiments, the story wonders what if the world ran on the equivalent of status from Facebook likes and attention from Twitter followers? Every social interaction, whether it be posting pictures to the internet or ordering coffee from a barista, is judged on a 5-star scale, with a person’s rating dictating the kind of house they can afford, their wait in line, their ability to get a seat on a plane, and their employment. Lacie (Bryce Dallas Howard) is a 4.2, but wants to up her game to 4.5 to live in a new luxurious apartment. But upping her game involves cutesy fakeness, and attending a wedding with an old not-so-friendly friend who’s a 4.8. The story touches on a bit of truth in television, since people with lots of followers on Twitter and Instagram do have the ability to monetize their popularity in ways others don’t. And there are people who can do that for no other reason than because they post pictures of themselves in tight clothes, or eating plates of exotic food at a nice restaurant. Also, China is currently developing a social credit system by 2020, which will “rate the trustworthiness of citizens in all facets of life,” with there already being some fears something similar might be mated with our current credit rating system right here in the U.S. of A.
- Playtest: Probably my least favorite episode of season 3, since I think David Cronenberg pulled off the same idea much better with Existenz. “Playtest” involves a young man named Cooper (Wyatt Russell) deciding to travel the world after encountering trouble at home. Due to a series of fortunate and unfortunate events that strands him in London, Cooper decides to take part in a gaming company’s experiment in order to earn some money. As one might guess, the experiment involves playing around with someone’s brain and a game that becomes a little too real. The ultimate twist of the episode didn’t really work for me, since it comes off as a cruel joke more than a gut punch based on some profound statement about the nature of reality.
- Shut Up and Dance: Alex Lawther plays a young man whose computer is hacked, with some sort of 4Chan/Anonymous hacker(s) recording him masturbating and then blackmailing the boy to do various tasks or risk the material being sent to all of his contacts. This eventually leads to him crossing paths with a businessman played by Jerome Flynn (better known as Bronn from Game of Thrones). Similar to season 2’s “White Bear”, the resolution of the episode puts the audience in the position of considering whether they say: “Fuck those people. They deserve it.”
- San Junipero: My favorite episode of season 3. It involves two women (Gugu Mbatha-Raw and Mackenzie Davis) who meet during the 1980s on the California coast. The two women become drawn to each other, and their relationship becomes more and more complex. The ending can arguably be seen as either the most uplifting resolution to a Black Mirror episode ever, or a deeply disturbing idea in which people are literally dehumanized.
“It’s kind of an ‘80s coming-of-age drama with a Black Mirror undertow,” Brooker says.
“Also, when Netflix picked us up, people were going, ‘Oh that means [the show is] going to be Americanised.’ I thought it would be a funny to f**k with those people by literally writing an episode set in California.”
- Men Against Fire: Malachi Kirby stars as a young fresh recruit in a highly advanced army at some point in the near-future. By this time, military personnel have implants which allow mission data and communication to be broadcast directly into their heads. These men and women are fighting beings known as “roaches,” who raid communities for food, live in abandoned shelters, and are considered threats to the well-being of humanity. The story makes many solid and terrifying points about what it takes for men and women to kill, as well as what a future government might do to make things more ... efficient.
- Hated in the Nation: In many ways, the episode is sort of the inverse of “The National Anthem” and again rails against online mobs. Two public figures involved in online shitstorms die due to mysterious causes. The investigation ultimately leads to a near-future solution for colony collapse disorder and Twitter hashtags. In many ways, the episode felt like it could have been a story on The X-Files, since it hits many of the same crime procedural beats.